She started slicing tomatoes, saying, “I’m glad you did it, Riley.”
I shook my head. “I shouldn’t have. It was stupid—”
“No.” She cut me off. “It wasn’t. It’s what you’re supposed to be doing. You probably should have done it months ago, right?”
“Maybe.” I shrugged uncomfortably. “It just seemed like there was never a good time.”
“Sometimes you have to make it a good time.” She smiled. “I guess you figured that out.” My mom shook her head. “I can’t believe you’ll be graduating high school this year.”
“Me either.”
It struck me that these were the times—more than when bills came due or we had to shovel out the car—that I wished my dad were still alive. Wished that it weren’t just me and her. Because even if we got the financial stuff figured out, the idea of leaving her here in this lonely house hurt.
“Maybe you should, you know, start dating, Mom.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“You know.” I blushed. “Go out. With guys.”
She stared at me, a different kind of smile stuck on her mouth. Half-amused, half-uncomfortable. “What brought this up?”
“I just think . . . I don’t know,” I fumbled, embarrassed. “Aren’t you lonely?” I blurted finally, giving her a glance before studying my ragged fingernails.
“Lonely?” she said slowly. “No. Not really.”
“But won’t you be?” I asked. “When—” I quickly corrected myself, “If I go to college? Someday?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe,” she said. “But I have friends here . . .”
I let the silence hang a minute, hoping she’d continue so I wouldn’t have to. But she didn’t.
“I know, Mom.” Her friends were mostly people from church or work—with their own families and husbands—who weren’t going to spend their evenings cooking dinner with her. “But maybe it’d be nice to have a . . .” I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it.
“Partner?” she said teasingly. “Companion?” She grinned. “It’s very sweet that you worry about me, Riley, but you don’t have to. Really. I’m fine and I’m happy.”
I gave her a skeptical look.
“There are people who look out for me,” she said comfortingly.
“But, Mom,” I blurted, “he’s married.”
She gaped at me, speechless. I was a little shocked I’d actually said it too.
“Yes,” she said after a minute, “but I can’t change that.”
“But you don’t have to be . . . involved in it.”
“What brought this up, Riley?”
Good question, one I wasn’t sure I could answer. Something to do with Sarah and me and Trip. And the binoculars. “It’s just . . . well, it doesn’t seem right, Mom.”
Her lips tightened, but she stayed calm. “It’s probably hard for you to understand, Riley. But we have a history, he and I. It means something. I care about him. He cares about me.”
Not enough to leave his wife, I wanted to say. That was the part that got me angriest, the way he used her. And she let him.
“It’s not ideal,” she was saying. “And I’ve agonized about it a lot for a long time, but I can’t be responsible for everyone’s happiness. I’m happy, he’s happy, and she’s . . . well, no less happy than she would be any other way, I think.”
I left it there. What else could I do? But I was disappointed, which is stupid, because parents are just people too, and most of the ones I knew—Trip’s, Natalie’s, mine—had proved time and again that they were far from perfect. I wanted my mom to be better, nobler. I didn’t love her any less, but I think I respected her less. It might have been unfair, given my own conduct, but somehow that made it even clearer for me. If I could feel how wrong it was, having only done it once or twice, how could she have let it go on for years?
Not that my heart didn’t skip a beat when my phone rang later, Sarah’s name on the caller ID.
“I had a thought,” she said when I picked up.
“Again?”
Sarah took a deep breath. “You know how John was saying something isn’t adding up?”
“Yeah.”
“Think about the things we know: what Galen said about that night, what we learned when we went back to the trailer, the lighter you found.”
“So?”
“How do we know all that stuff?”
“Well, Trip talked to Galen—”
“How did we even start to suspect him in the first place?” she interrupted.
“Richie Milosevich said he was up there.”
“Said it to who?” Sarah prodded.
I hesitated, thinking, and she continued.
“Who encouraged us to go back to the trailer to map? Where we just happened to find Moose’s lighter?” she continued. “And who was the first one to tell us Nat’s dad had been killed? Who heard it on the scanner?”
The answer to all of it was the same.
“Trip.” His name dropped from my lips like a lead ball, her point chillingly clear. “You think he’s been lying?” I said. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” she asked.
I thought about that a second, the answer obvious. “To protect someone,” I said. “Like Natalie. Or Galen.”
“Or himself.”
CHAPTER 28
WE DECIDED TO TALK TO Trip together. He was supposed to go to Sarah’s after football practice. He’d just find me waiting there also.
I’d tossed the situation around after talking to Sarah, and the next day too, looking for explanations and alternatives, but Sarah was right. Every angle could be drawn back to him. “But he was the one pressing us to investigate,” I’d argued. “Why would he do that if he were involved?”
“Was he really, Ri?” she’d asked. “Think about it. Were we investigating, or just following up on things he was feeding us?”
“It was just you and me mapping the crime scene. He didn’t even want to go.”
“Maybe he’d already been up there,” she’d said. “Left the lighter, moved things around. Who knows?”
“Why would he kill Natalie’s dad?”
“I don’t know.” Sarah had paused and I’d listened to her soft breathing through the phone, pictured her in her living room, frowning, trying to figure it out. “Self-defense? To protect Natalie? Anger?”